Of Fear and Strangers : The Forgotten Histories of Xenophobia

 

The most influential physician to ever preside over Western medicine observed that a man bitten by a rabid dog developed a raving form of madness. During the second century of the Roman Empire, Claudius Galenus wrote that “hydrophobia” was heralded by a frothing at the mouth and a bizarre aversion to water. So the “phobias” in medicine began.
 
Soon after the French Revolution, an entirely new class of phobic troubles appeared. During the Jacobin Terror, Philippe Pinel, the French founder of “mental medicine,” noted that some of his traumatized patients suffered from a nervous state akin to canine madness. It too was marked by a foaming fear, but his patients’ troubles were preceded not by a dog bite but rather by a sudden, violent emotion. Alienists began to follow the influential Dr. Pinel and refer to these patients, with their agitation, shortness of breath, and tight throats, as cases of “nervous hydrophobia.”
 
That was the first crack. After 1850, as more nervous specialists left the hospitals and opened outpatient offices, they happened upon many outwardly normal citizens who secretly suffered from what was called, among other things, anxiety, angst, obsessions, morbid fears, and deliriums of doubt. In 1871 phobia would be added to that list, when the German alienist Carl Westphal wrote of a gentleman who came to him with an overwhelming terror of open spaces. The doctor suggested that this state was best named by combining the Greek word phobos with the prefix agora, the place of public assembly in ancient Athens. And so “agoraphobia” was born.
 
A swarm of phobias seemed to menace the populace. Doctors reported cases of zoophobia, hematophobia, toxophobia, syphilophobia, monophobia, and phobophobia, the fear of being frightened. In this gathering of great frights, the neo-​Grecian compound term “xenophobia” made its debut. Roget’s Thesaurus listed “xenophobia” as a synonym for “repugnance” and cross-​referenced it with “hydrophobia” and “canine madness.” Its cause—​a violent shock or some strange inheritance—​never was clear. Still, the term found its way into Thomas Stedman’s influential medical dictionary, defined as the “morbid dread of meeting strangers.”
 
By 1900 skeptics had begun to roll their eyes at this naming furor. Either phobias were a new plague, some said, or the physicians themselves were worked up into some frenzy. When a patient presented with a new dread, someone grabbed hold of a fancy prefix, added “phobia,” and presto, a malady was born. One commentator dryly noted that the number of human phobias seemed limited only by the Greek dictionary. He was being kind. There were also lots of choices from Latin.
 
 As xenophobia splashed and then sank into medical obscurity, it simultaneously bobbed up within political discourse. Around 1880 anonymous journalists in the British and French press began to describe an extreme trouble called xenophobia or xénophobie. From London and Paris, this expression spread, carried forth during the heyday of newspaper publishing.
 
During the last years of the nineteenth century, readership skyrocketed as hundreds of dailies and weeklies sprang up, thanks to increased literacy, decreased censorship, technical advances in printing, and telegraphic lines that ran under oceans. Centralized press agencies like Reuters emerged as nodal points for gathering and dispersing stories from abroad. During this fertile age for print journalism, xénos was linked to phobos, in a manner that might seem to be associated with medicine and science, but in reality had little relation to them. Instead, it made sense of a new kind of political antipathy, not so much the religious zealotry of earlier times, but a malady called “nationalism.”
 
After the American and French revolutions, as well as the Napoleonic wars, many nineteenth-​century Western nations gradually altered their makeup. Once feudal European states secularized and adopted more republican values, by which sovereignty was vested in the people. Weakened traditional elites and religious authorities, once wielding the crown and cross, could no longer as effectively use such time-​honored methods to ensure social order. Into this vacuum, nationalism emerged with different self-​defining strategies intended to cement the commitment of the citizenry.
 
A state is a bounded geographic and political entity, but a nation may be little more than a shared group of ideas. While these might seem parochial, overvalued, or arbitrary, a firm commitment to them was lauded by that Counter-​Enlightenment thinker, Johann Gottfried von Herder. Against the universal principles carried forth by Napoleon’s invading armies into Germanic lands, against abstractions like liberty, fraternity, and equality, this friend of Goethe sought to protect, preserve, and invest pride in one’s own nation and its mother tongue. A brilliant, wide-​ranging thinker whose work on linguistics and anthropology would be seminal, Herder took a stand for the local cultures that he believed were menaced by French edicts. He defended the Germanic adaptations and solutions that made up their culture. Thus for Herder, national identity was founded not on natural law, philosophy, or ethics, but rather on history. It took shape from common customs and beliefs, and a body of defining stories. National unity and pride were supported by public monuments, the hoopla of rousing anthems, flags, festivals, shrines to the dead, and commemorative holidays. All this boosted the nation as the focus of individual loyalty and sacrifice.
 
 Nationalism also found its way into the dark political arts. By undercutting the universality of Enlightenment principles, nationalism could be used to justify oppression, inequality, and division, and it had the power to unleash conflict based on hyped-​up differences with other nations. That was a chronic problem but also an advantage, since national enemies made even a quarrelsome, divided community sacrifice their young, pay their taxes, and remain closely united. Such rivals were best if irredeemable, thus available to be invoked at any time. Newly constructed national identities were especially likely to stabilize themselves by pitting a “unique” national character, just the way we are and always have been, against those of a rival. Minor discrepancies could be made immutable, essential. Ancient massacres and battles could be cultivated, taught to the young, and repeated in days of remembrance. Old wounds could be pried open and never allowed to heal.
 
Such nationalist strategies proved to be potent, so much so that they risked spiraling out of control. Alarmed, commentators began to discuss the risk of stoking these embers. Take, for example, the burning hatred that existed between the British and the French. At war on and off for five hundred years, these nations during the nineteenth century were said to be ill. Londoners worried that France harbored many “Anglophobiacs” or “Anglophobists.” On other side of the Channel, French journalists commented on their readers’ ravenous appetite for anything that fed their “Anglophobia.” They wondered if the British public had equally succumbed to “Francophobes.”
 
Patriotic zealotry began to be referred to as a “phobia.” Given its position as the most dominant power on the globe, Great Britain was said to be the most popular target for such a wild animus. By 1870 the field of national phobias had grown more crowded. Heated rivalries led journalists, scholars, and diplomats to routinely claim that fair-​minded, rational political dialogue had been supplanted by “Francophobia,” “Germanophobia,” and “Russophobia,” not to mention “Austrophobia,” “Sinophobia,” and “Turkophobia.” In addition, there was a phobia for that supposed nation of wanderers, a “Judeophobia” or “Hebrewphobia.”
 
As discussions of national prejudices mounted, an even more menacing distemper stepped forward. Some nations were so deeply hostile to rivals that they targeted all other nations. “Xenophobia” described such an overheated hatred. Extreme but mercifully rare, “xenophobia” was the most vicious form of ultranationalism. An early, revealing use of this anonymously coined term occurred in 1880 during a visit to London by the ardent Frenchman Ernest Renan.

 
Born in 1823, Renan was a diligent, provincial boy who seemed headed for the priesthood. He excelled in his seminary studies and developed a passion for the Hebrew language, which he told his mother “holds the greatest charm for me.” He expanded his study to other Semitic languages at the Collège de France and became deeply immersed in philology. This, however, led to a profound crisis. Renan was dismayed to find that mistranslations of Hebrew guided certain matters of Catholic faith. Stung and shocked, the sincere youth forever renounced the church. As a friend wryly observed, he “gambled his life on a comma.”
 
Renan turned his considerable energies to the Near East, Semitic languages, and the history of religion. In 1855 his General History of the Semitic Languages led him to offer a conclusion not just about these languages but about the “races” that created them. With evident pride, he proclaimed: “I am then the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-​European race, actually represents an inferior combination of human nature.” For that achievement, he would also be dubbed the first “anti-​Semite.”
 
Five years later, the French government sent Renan on an archaeological expedition to Lebanon, a trip he undertook with his wife and his sister Henriette. The pilgrimage was life-​altering. Inspired by the sights and smells of the Holy Land, Renan began to write a popular history of Jesus Christ. The project, though, was tinged with tragedy, for the originator of this idea, his sister, succumbed to malaria in the seaside town of Amchit. After returning to France, Renan published his biography of Christ, that “incomparable man.” Man? His Life of Jesus was swiftly denounced by the church, and following that well-​worn path, it became a bestseller.
 
After France’s humiliating loss to the Prussians in 1871 and the chaotic rise and fall of the Paris Commune, the once liberal Renan became a devout nationalist, an authoritarian, and an advocate of foreign conquest. France must become a colonial power, he declared, or it would descend into civil war. This was the Ernest Renan who arrived in London to deliver the Hibbert Lectures a decade later. By then, the traditional enemy of the English, the French, had established an empire that was growing at a staggering rate, and Ernest Renan was rightly considered a zealous nationalist.
 
Despite all that, Renan’s lectures in London were mobbed. To win the crowd over, he used flattery, telling them that England had established the one dogma that “our society” should always hold: “Liberty, respect for the mind.” He then launched into his history of Christianity, singing the praises of the Savior who rose above Judaism—​a religion far too “primitive” to ever become global. He piled contempt onto Rome and the Pope. And then he departed, bathed in British adulation. The Daily News, stunned by Renan’s popularity on British soil, called it a “xenomania.” This stance, they added in what may have been a dig at the French, was always preferable to “xenophobia, which is of necessity and always unintelligent.”
 
Xenophobia, for some, seemed to be nationalism gone utterly mad. Or was it the foundation beneath all the specific national biases? The French Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, a future Noble Peace Prize winner, believed it was the latter. He wrote: “Before being Germanophobe,” the warmongers “were Anglophobe and Russophobe,” that is, always “xenophobe or demophobe.”
 
Such irrational loathing was not unlike those described by the medical men, only this time the illness struck whole nations. If the nation offered a powerful framework for identity, ​if it puffed itself up with ceremonies and song, it also might whip up fright and dislike for foreign nations, perhaps all other nations.
 
One of the most influential thinkers to contemplate such risks was none other than the same Ernest Renan. In 1882 at the Sorbonne, he delivered a widely circulated lecture entitled “What is a Nation?” While some equated the nation with one’s bloodline and race, Renan—​despite his own bigotry—​rejected this as absurd. What race made up France? Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic, and more. No, the most noble nations were of mixed heritage and “mixed blood.” Purity of religion, ethnicity, and language defined no nation. Large, successful nations glued together multitudes.
 
Across the Atlantic, the African American orator extraordinaire Frederick Douglass had made a similar case for a “composite nation,” one whose citizenry included Chinese immigrants, with “the negro, mulatto, and Latin races,” offering all full citizenship and benefiting as a result. However, in such a composite, what was the glue that held everyone together? If states had geographic borders, what boundaries defined a nation? Nations, Renan declared, were not racial or hereditary, but man-​made. A national community bonded over a set of remembrances but, perhaps more importantly, shared amnesias. Everyone would thereby inhabit the same memory-​scape.
 
For Renan, making a nation required a violent relation to one’s past. Continuities must be broken, failures erased, and false connections inserted so as to serve the nation, this dreamed-​up creation. Citizens were emboldened by accounts that claimed so-​called victims of their nation’s actions never existed or deserved what they got. For Renan, that also meant that shifting the boundaries of memory could be political dynamite. Prior members of the nation might suddenly seem like outsiders. Forgotten actions might bring to light injustice or illegitimate acts. In a flash, brothers might seem like foreigners, allies like enemies, and supposed enemies not so at all.
 
 Excerpted from Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia. By George Makari. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2021.
 
A Malady Called Nationalism. By George Makari. Lapham’s Quarterly, September 15, 2021.

No one remembers  Jean Martin de Saintours. Though his aspirations were at times grand, he lived out his days scuttling between France and England, confined to a life of intellectual hard labor as a translator and stenographer. And yet I found him at the center of a storm that crashed over much of the globe, and now seems to be doing so again.
 
Five years ago, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, I set out in search of the origins of the word “xenophobia.” Its birthplace seemed obvious. In ancient Greece, it was said, a wise man combined “xénos” — which connoted both stranger and guest — with “phobos,” their word for fear. Since xenophobia was an eternal and ubiquitous human problem, it made sense that its origins lay near the start of Western civilization, when some Aristotle-like figure opened his eyes and spotted it before him.
 
All that, I discovered, was nonsense. The ancient Greeks — or the written record we have of them — never employed this term. Instead, in a historical moment with similarities to our own, the word emerged alongside troubles fostered by rapid globalization. And lingering by the starting blocks, off to the side, stood Jean Martin de Saintours.
 
 
Around 1880, a number of influential psychiatrists concluded that irrational fears constituted discrete illnesses. In a flash, French, German, British, and American doctors proposed dozens of medical “phobias.” First came claustrophobia and agoraphobia, then zoophobia, hematophobia, toxophobia, syphilophobia, monophobia, and phobophobia, the fear of being frightened. In this gathering of great frights, the neo-Grecian compound term “xenophobia” made its first, fleeting appearance.
 
As that coinage splashed and then sank into scientific obscurity, another simultaneously bobbed up in fin-de-siècle French and British newspapers. During this fertile age for print journalism, xénos was linked to phobos to describe an extreme form of nationalism. Political commentators worried that modern nation-states, stripped of Crown and Cross, now sought to maintain internal unity by stoking hatred for a common enemy. “Anglophobia,” for example, served to unite disparate members of a rival nation, but it might also provoke constant bloodshed. The worst form of this trouble, an expert advised, occurred in wobbly places like Romania, where a fear and hatred of all nations — xenophobia — might take root. This extravagant claim — really, all nations? — found few defenders.
 
The history of ideas is filled with such half-run races in which, after a short burst, the explanatory power and relevance of a notion fades and collapses. However, when the historical context shifts, that concept may find new purpose and re-emerge as the missing piece of a newly assembled puzzle.
 
 
On April 14, 1900, the Exposition Universelle in Paris threw open its doors to adoring crowds. Millions of visitors toured its marvels, which included ethnological villages and human zoos stocked with members of far-off tribes like the Malagasy from Madagascar and the Dahomean from West Africa. A poster depicted Arabs and Asians at the foot of a heavenly, white goddess. Thanks to Western technology and industrial wealth, it seemed, the entire world was coming together.
 
Alongside these festive reports, French newspapers featured a more disturbing story, one of things falling apart. On July 17, 1900, Le Constitutionnel ran a short, unsigned dispatch from Shanghai telling of a new “xénophobe” movement in northern China. Three days later, Georges Clemenceau’s left-wing paper, La Justice, picked up the story and used that term. Next, it showed up in L’Univers, then one of the most literary papers, Le Journal. As fall arrived, La Presse featured a headline warning of China’s xenophobia, and by October, Le Figaro and Le Matin assumed readers knew exactly what was meant when they denounced Chinese “xénophobes.” In less than a year, xénophobe and xénophobie had become part of the French lexicon.
 
Parisians learned that the trouble with “les xénophobes” commenced in a corner of northern China during the winter of 1899. Amid a drought, a group of young Chinese men united the traditions of mass possession from the Spirit Boxers with the invulnerability rituals and beliefs of the Big Sword Society. Using spells, swallowed charms, deep breathing, and martial arts, they came to believe themselves invulnerable to swords and bullets. These “Yihequan,” or “Boxers United in Righteousness,” adopted a simple slogan: “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.”
 
Two years earlier, a pair of German missionaries had been killed, a harbinger of what was to come. On December 31, 1899, a British evangelist was murdered, followed by a group of four French and Belgian engineers. As the disparate national identities of the victims made clear, the Boxers were not specifically Anglophobic, Francophobic, or Germanophobic. Their country was occupied by many foreign powers, and they declared war on all of them. Over the next months, as tension built, more skirmishes were reported, and then, almost overnight, thousands of Boxers swarmed the streets, eager to burn down Western churches and chase down immigrants. In the rioting, nearly 200 non-Chinese were murdered.
 
The Boxers’ revolt followed decades of furious globalization. During the second half of the 19th century, a tidal wave of Western expansion was driven by demographic pressures at home and new advances like steam power, the telegraph, and medicines like quinine. A grand reunion of human tribes thus began, cheered on by some as the dawn of a universal age. Beneath the grandeur of such proclamations, however, another reality lurked. International interdependence commenced at the end of a long gun. Between 1870 and 1914, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium conquered weaker lands in a stampede for new markets, cheap resources, and forced labor. Japan and America jumped in as well, but this was mostly Europe’s party. Their unprecedented conquests spread out over nearly all of Africa, as well as many parts of Asia.
 
A thick web of narratives justified these actions. The expansion of European culture eastward was widely celebrated, thanks to what the French called their “civilizing mission.” British Anglo-Saxon, German Teutonic, French Catholic, and Russian pan-Slavic expansionists were encouraged to imagine themselves as philanthropists. They came, it was said, not in a mad scramble for wealth, land, and power, but as peacekeepers, liberators, and educators. Missionaries, schoolteachers, and functionaries carried the flags of freedom, rubbing up against a motley crew of fortune hunters, ex-convicts, libertines, slave traders, and pirates. So confident were they in their righteousness, the good of their God, and superiority of their lineage, that they could make little sense of the hostile reactions of their hosts. When a whirling group of rebels in China announced their mission to attack and destroy all foreigners, this terrifying reaction demanded an explanation.
 
German commentators warned of a “Fremdenfeindschaft,” “stranger-as-enemy relationship” endemic to the Chinese. That never translated into other tongues. Instead, the French xénophobie infiltrated English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and more. Almost immediately, readers of those languages heard stories about “xenophobic propaganda,” “secret xenophobic societies,” and the power of “xenophobes” to stir up bloodlust in the masses. The British and French discovered xenophobia not just in the Chinese but a wide array of Asians, Africans, and Arabs. The Italians decried it in their recalcitrant hosts, the Ethiopians, while the Spanish diagnosed it in the Moroccans. In a few years, everyone from an American reader of glossy magazines to a British diplomat to a French businessman knew exactly what was meant by “xenophobia.”
 
Xenophobia answered the plaintive colonizer’s question: why do they hate us? The response had nothing to do with land grabs, theft, indentured servitude, or occupation. Nor was this an exercise in Romanian-style ultra-nationalism. This xenophobia was due to an in-born condition, a reflexive fear and hatred of all strangers that, anthropologists duly explained, stemmed from the racial inferiority of these primitives. Race-based xenophobia became the missing piece of the colonists’ puzzle.
 
 
Why could I find no memorialization of this upside-down birth? And who was the wordsmith who first used xenophobia in this, well, xenophobic way? Unfortunately, news reports, like the first one published in Le Constitutionnel, went unsigned. Some unknown scribe had sent a report from Shanghai to a news service, where a faceless dispatcher received that report and then disseminated it. Along the way, their hidden hands framed faraway events for a vast reading public. Learning more than that seemed impossible.
 
Then, while scouring the results produced by powerful, online search engines, I found a cranky letter, dated June 4, 1915, to the editors of The Globe, one of London’s leading newspapers. The author quickly established himself as the kind of fellow who took pleasure in correcting another’s grammar. He chastised the editors for their misguided usages of “Boche,” a derogatory French term for Germans, which the letter-writer explained came from the Latin for “Kaiser of the Teutsch.” His note ended with an aside:
 
   “The process by which some words come into general use is rather obscure. During the days of the Boxers’ Rebellion, I launched the word “Xénophobe.” It caught on in the French Press, and is now to be found in some dictionaries!”
 
The letter was signed, “Yours faithfully, Jean de Saintours, The College of Preceptors, W.C.” After piecing together his noms de plume — Jean P. A. Martin de Saintours, Jean P. A. Martin, and J. Martin-de-Saint-Ours — I discovered that this man descended from a dwindling noble line with roots in the Périgord region. In 1883, the young scion was listed as French deputy consul to the United States. Under that title, this patriot hosted a conference in Lyon on the need to teach French to natives in the colonies.

 
During the following years, he developed a formal expertise in stenography, then a lively semiotic science, quite useful when deployed in tandem with the telegraph and that new wonder, the telephone. Our man, I found, took out ads in French newspapers offering his services to journalists who wished to employ transatlantic telegraphic or telephonic means to send or access news from abroad. By 1893, Jean Martin had been appointed senior telephone stenographer for Reuters. In this capacity, he gathered information, wrote reports, and distributed them to news outlets.
 
As news of the Boxer uprising broke, an ad for his services placed Martin at 32 rue du Rocher near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Right place, right time. The idea that he would have the nerve to coin a new term was also believable. In his scattered writings, Martin reveled in wordplay and neologisms; he even jumped into kooky linguistic debates, like the ones stimulated by the British Simplified Speling Sosieti. Unless he chose to lie about a matter that no one cared about, the polyglot Jean Martin de Saintours, sitting at the hub of a network of global communications, concocted the compound word “xenophobe” to account for these Chinese rebels, and seeded this explanatory term throughout Western metropoles and their colonies.
 
All of that was swiftly forgotten in a fog of collective amnesia. Just as well, I first thought. Why sully this noble precept with its sordid start? And yet without that beginning, the following chapters — in which this new “commonsense” was transformed into rank prejudice — also faded from view. An array of critics ripped at the extravagant lies tied to colonialism and racist theorizing, until the original conception of xenophobia collapsed into contradiction and paradox. It then was made to do an about-face, so as to account for bigoted imperialists who could not imagine that occupied people might have legitimate grievances, and for anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic movements in London, Paris, and Berlin. Subsequently, behavioral scientists took up the hunt for the sources of this redefined, psychosocial ill.
 
That sea-change happened neither effortlessly nor overnight. Only by remembering xenophobia’s first instantiation do we bring these broader battles into focus. For the contested ground named by Jean Martin de Saintours became far more than a matter of semantics; it buttressed aspects of Western ethics, psychology, science, economics, and political power. In the end, what was at stake was nothing less than fundamental notions of identity — of I and thou, us and them, stranger and host — that had been thrown into question by new forms of global interconnection and radical technological change, disruptions not unlike the ones we face today.
 
 
This essay was adapted and excerpted from Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
 
 
The Invention of “Xenophobia”.  By George Makari. Los Angeles Review Books, October 6, 2021. 

What has caused the recent international resurgence of xenophobia? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. He discovered that while the fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not that long ago.

 
Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators, and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged as a popular cultural concept alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of the Holocaust, and then on to its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia’s evolution through writers like Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy and psychology, Makari also offers insights into related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the other, and institutional bias.
 
Makari offers a unifying paradigm for comprehending more clearly how xenophobia, other irrational anxieties and contests over identity sweep through cultures and lead to the dangerous divisions so prevalent today. George Hammond talks with George Makari.
 
 Commonwealth Club of California, September 29, 2021. 

W.W. Norton  & Company

Germany is Broken

Last fall, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt ran an odd essay about Max von Baden, the last chancellor of the German Empire. In 1918, von Baden had unilaterally forced the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, ushering in the Weimar Republic. The author of the essay framed the incident as a “lesson about timing in politics.” If Max von Baden hadn’t hesitated as long as he had before ending the monarchy, he argued, the revolution of November 1918 might have been averted, and the Weimar Republic might have stood on far more solid, more legitimate feet.

This centennial commemoration of a statesman’s inactivity and its far-reaching consequences was itself a lesson about timing: Die Welt published it to coincide with an election in the state of Hesse, in central Germany. Seemingly innocuous, the article was in fact intended as a message to another politician who has demonstrated a mastery of sitting out problems, hoping they’ll simply solve themselves. Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had been losing support in national and state elections, frequently to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Die Welt’s message would have been obvious to anyone paying close attention: step aside, or else reap the populist whirlwind.

The essay’s author, however, was not an upstart of a new post-Merkel party. It was Wolfgang Schäuble, the 76-year-old stalwart of the pre-Merkel CDU, someone who had been until recently her most visible minister. In the event, the CDU lost 11.3 percent of the vote share in Hesse, and the AfD and the Green Party once again overperformed. Merkel heeded the nudge. A few days after the election, she agreed to step aside as head of the CDU—step one of a slow-motion resignation.

For more than a decade, beginning with the crash of 2008 and on through the various monetary crises that followed, as well as the wave of right-wing populism that swept into office illiberal governments across Europe, Germany had functioned as an outlier—a beacon of stability in an uncertain world. It was widely regarded (and certainly regarded itself) as a buttress of the Eurozone’s economic health against irresponsible spending. The Brexit vote threw into relief Germany’s role as the main guarantor of the European Union’s political stability and bolstered its claim to being the center of Europe. After Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency the new German self-image seemed to find its ultimate embodiment in Merkel herself, the new “leader of the free world.”

Yet only two years later, as the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey recently wrote in the New York Times, “the stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end.” That monotony has a name: Alternativlosigkeit, or alternativelessness. Although it was Merkel who would come to be associated with that word, Schäuble was the one who provided its affective and somatic underpinnings. Merkel was the prophet of alternativelessness; Schäuble was its embodiment.

 Though—like many commentators in Europe and the US—Nachtwey links that end to the pressures brought to bear on centrist Merkel from the populist left and right, one of the remarkable things about the Merkeldämmerung is that it is largely forces within Schäuble’s and Merkel’s party that are threatening to undo the German exception. Those forces throw a light on how the exception emerged in the first place.

Most Germans remember that Angela Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian “sister party” the CSU are separate entities only when there are state elections in Bavaria—the only state in which the CSU fields candidates and in which the CDU fields none. This has been the arrangement since 1949: the CSU provides the CDU with a massive trove of votes and members, along with an effective and populist right wing. And in exchange the CDU provides the CSU with a direct line from local politics into the national centers of power (the CSU is, for instance, guaranteed a certain number of posts in any CDU/CSU-led government), as well as respectability and a dose of cosmopolitan credibility.

The CSU has been central to the CDU juggernaut, and that juggernaut, in turn, has been central to the sometimes reassuring, often soul-killing, sameness of German politics. But in 2018 the dynamic shifted. In the lead-up to the Bavarian elections, which took place in July of that year, the CSU suddenly seemed ready to abandon the governing coalition in Berlin. At issue were the refugees arriving at the German border (albeit in smaller numbers than before). Perhaps emboldened by the rhetoric of the AfD, the head of the CSU, Horst Seehofer, demanded that some of the new arrivals be turned away. It was a largely symbolic demand: Seehofer wanted Merkel to show a little bit of cruelty to brown people, but the chancellor refused his pressure. All at once, Germany’s steadiness was under threat—and not only under threat from within, but from within the within. Here was the spectacle of a parliamentary democracy, conceived with an extraordinary degree of autoimmune response to authoritarian takeovers, turning on itself.

Recent European history suggests that the rise of far-right parties, and the mainstream’s response to it, plays out in one of two ways. The first we might call the French model: as the right wing makes more and more inroads, left and center-right band together to defend the liberal order, even if each has serious misgivings about that order. As a result the parties defending some version of the status quo become faceless and interchangeable, and the only “true” alternative becomes the far right. The other is the Austrian model: alarmed by the rise of the far right, the nominal center moves sharply to the right in hopes of “winning back” lost voters. Those voters unsurprisingly prefer the genuine article. So the old guard enters into an alliance with the far right, hoping either to demystify the fringe, or simply to be eaten last.

Merkel ended up winning in July, but her victory was mostly Pyrrhic: while the Bavarian election seemed to bear out her instincts over Seehofer’s, her party still lost votes. The disagreement between Merkel and Seehofer came down to the French model versus the Austrian one. More fundamentally, however, both politicians were in tacit agreement that Germany, which had made it its mission to be different from other countries—which had taken it as a point of pride to be the exception—was no longer unique. It was neither imbued with terrible historical memories that rendered it constitutively immune to the seductions of right-wing populism, nor blessed with institutions uniquely unsusceptible to a takeover. Germany was, in the end, either France or Austria—that was all.

Nachtwey and others have argued that the end of what he calls “social modernity”—which has resulted in the rise of precarious and ad hoc labor and the decline of unions—creates a downward pressure that allows for the rise of protest movements on the left and the right. In his book Germany’s Hidden Crisis, Nachtwey writes that the problems that have torn apart the social consensus in France and Austria, as well as Spain and Italy, have been smoldering underneath in Germany as well—the titular hidden crisis. “The conflicts in our country have largely remained latent,” he writes, “which is no doubt due to the present economic and institutional stability.” Between the book’s German publication in 2016 and the American release last fall, the latter began to give way. The former, however, did not, even though it is now looking more and more likely that Germany is sliding into recession.

Yet as Nachtwey puts it in his afterword, Germany likely would have remained “a bastion of political stability” had “the so-called refugee crisis not abruptly exposed the social tensions that had accumulated over decades.” This diagnosis seems immediately plausible. But in a way Nachtwey’s conditional formulation is in itself quite interesting—it isn’t immediately clear how a crisis that, as he correctly notes, was at best so-called, and one which at least initially unleashed a wave of solidarity with the new arrivals across the country, ultimately ended up containing this explosive potential.

The question, then, is what has been hiding Germany’s hidden crisis. Nachtwey was once an associate researcher at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School). No less a predecessor than Adorno proposed, when reflecting on the rise of neo-Nazi groups, that “even in the midst of prosperity . . . the majority of people probably feel secretly that they are potentially unemployed, recipients of charity, and hence really objects, not subjects of society: this is the fully legitimate and reasonable cause of their discomfort.” Adorno made this observation in 1959. It may have been as true then as it was when Nachtwey made it in 2016. But it seems for that very reason unlikely to fully explain what has happened over the last few years. As the political scientist Philip Manow has put it, the idea that right-wing populism succeeds mostly among those left behind by neoliberalism “is not wrong in general, but it does not suffice as a general explanation.” Between Adorno and Nachtwey we could ask: since their answer has long been the correct one, why did it take so long for that fact to reveal itself?

The state of Baden-Württemberg lies just west of Bavaria. Home to corporations like Mercedes Benz, the software company SAP, and Bosch, the state is immensely prosperous. Its population is about ten million, and the unemployment rate is 3.1 percent. If there’s a hidden crisis in Germany, it’s particularly hidden here. And yet in 2017 about 12 percent of the population voted for the AfD. (In 2017 the AfD’s national numbers were 12.6 percent.) Like the post-election coverage of the American rust belt, accounts of the AfD’s rise tend to talk about anomie in East Germany, Merkel’s home turf. But Baden-Württemberg doesn’t lend itself to those kinds of narratives. To understand why the far right might resonate in such a rich and successful state, it is instructive to look to Schäuble, Baden-Württemberg’s native son.

At the national level, the AfD’s success is without precedent. In Baden-Württemberg, however, it is not. In 1968, the neo-Nazi NPD won 9.8 percent of the vote there. In 1992 the far-right Republicans (REP) won 10.9 percent, and in 1996 they received 9.1 percent. In a 2014 interview Schäuble pointed out exactly this trend: “The Republicans were history rather quickly, I think it’ll be the same with the AfD.” Many commentators at the time were outraged at this business-as-usual response, but it represented a sound structural grasp of German politics. One of the features of the crises Germany faces is that they have always been with us. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck once pointed out, the concept of “crisis” has long been used to impose a demand. What is striking about the German crises of recent years—the one surrounding the refugees as much as the political one precipitated by it, the rise of the AfD as much as the wave of cruelty attending its rise—is that they are neither sudden nor truly disruptive. They have been built into the way Germany has functioned for the last thirty years.

The spike in refugees arriving in 2015 created administrative challenges across Europe, but the only crisis worthy of the name concerned the relentless politicization of the sudden influx, both among EU-member countries and by political parties within them. While Merkel focused on the logistical nature of the problem—“we can do this,” she said in a soundbite that has been thrown in her face ever since—others were intent on making the crisis something it was not: a clash of cultures. This tactical retreat from feasibility politics was a beat-by-beat replay of earlier confrontations. The angry protestors and politicians screaming about the danger posed by refugees were reading from an old script.

The so-called “asylum debate” that now buoys the fortunes of the AfD first entered German politics in the mid-1980s. It was conjured into existence by the CDU itself, as a convenient election strategy. In response to an uptick in the number of asylum seekers, CSU politicians like Edmund Stoiber and Franz Josef Strauß fantasized about the possibility of “one hundred million potential refugees.” Just like Seehofer in 2018, they threatened to leave the partnership with the CDU unless they were allowed to turn refugees away at the border. Lead articles in the German press blared about “waves” of Muslims coming to rape Germany’s daughters and election posters declared the boat full.

Schäuble, then Kohl’s secretary of the interior (the department responsible for security and immigration), took a sort of middle tack. A conservative himself, he nonetheless steered clear of the rhetorical excesses of Stoiber and the CSU. But at the same time he sought to signal that limiting the number of asylum seekers was of paramount importance. His reasoning was vintage Schäuble: fifty thousand refugees, he said, “wouldn’t be a problem,” but “one hundred thousand is the magic threshold which would activate certain political sensibilities.”

You might think Schäuble was talking about what numbers the state’s bureaucracy could deal with. But no, the number has to do with “certain political sensibilities.” Exceeding it would by some strange magic anger “the people”—the kinds of people who set fire to kebab stands, one supposes. At the time Germany was accepting between 120,000 and 200,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. The economy was strong, the Deutschmark dominant in Europe. The convulsions brought about by unification were still in the future. What Schäuble was really saying was: unless there is some suffering inflicted on some of these new arrivals, the people will revolt.

Schäuble got his wish, but the people, or a subset of them, revolted anyway. The inevitable wave of racist violence started in West Germany well before the Iron Curtain came down, but it asserted itself most spectacularly in post-unification East Germany, a more homogeneous society undergoing rapid changes. In August 1992, for instance, residents of Rostock-Lichtenhagen laid siege to apartment buildings housing refugees and legal Vietnamese guest workers. For four days and nights neo-Nazis hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks into the buildings to the cheers of onlookers, who flashed Hitler salutes for the cameras. The police withdrew at first, but finally returned—to deport the residents of the besieged houses. (Their neighbors got a month of free rent.)

In the end, the first run-through of the “asylum debate” vindicated Schäuble’s instinct: the German state exacted its pound of flesh, sent back asylum seekers, and caused the newcomers untold suffering and frustration. The result represented a sort of compact between respectable conservatives and the crueler instincts of their base. Faced with an outpouring of cruelty and violence, political leaders moved to placate the victimizers and punish their victims. Live out your worst impulses, the compact says, and we will spend speech upon speech and talk show upon talk show telling you it isn’t really your fault. More importantly, we will take your verbal and physical violence to stand in for how “Germans” really feel. It is this reversal of thrust that Angela Merkel refused in the summer of 2015.

Schäuble’s suggestion that the AfD would go the way of all their far-right predecessors has come to be regarded as a serious misdiagnosis, yet this was how the system had worked for nearly a half-century. After neo-Nazis won almost 10 percent of the vote in the sixties, they threw their support for the next election, in 1972, behind the CDU’s candidate, a former Nazi with not entirely former-Nazi views. In the mid-1990s, Oskar Lafontaine, then head of the SPD, tried to score points by fulminating against immigrants and was seen as giving the REP an unexpected bounce. Today the voluble mayor of the university town of Tübingen, a member of the Green Party, worries aloud about refugees in tones that, while definitely miles away from the AfD, seem designed to resonate with its voters.

Schäuble’s interview is now five years old. In the interim it has become clear that the major parties can no longer swallow the politics of cruelty they have habitually seeded and then reabsorbed. German conservatism had long colonized a swamp on its right flank, a swamp consisting of things you couldn’t say or talk about, but to which you could point and be understood. Now their connection to that swamp has become tenuous. When mainstream politicians stray into it they either get lost or don’t find what they’re looking for. The CSU in particular understands the AfD’s codes, having deployed them themselves for decades. But by last summer the CSU’s populism was a knock-off, while voters had gotten a taste for the real thing.

Why have voters refused to be reabsorbed by parties like the CSU this time around? Many have proposed a generational explanation for this transformation: younger people, farther from Nazism and the Holocaust, have reclaimed territory onto which their elders dared not venture. But the AfD is not a youth movement—it is most popular among those 45 and older. Others have blamed the legitimating function of social media. There is certainly something to that idea, but the AfD seems less dependent on fake Facebook content and email forwards than, say, its Trumpist equivalents. The party’s evangelists publish books, give public readings, and organize foundations, boring hard boards like everyone else. 

Perhaps the answer is that it isn’t the right that has changed; it’s the mainstream that would have to reabsorb it. The “asylum debate” of the 1980s and ’90s was conducted among ethnic Germans over the heads of second- and third-generation immigrants: people who had German passports, spoke German, and considered themselves German, but were not admitted to be authentically so. When buildings were burned it was often their houses, not those of the asylum seekers the supposed debate was about.

This has changed, though not nearly quickly enough. Germans with immigrant backgrounds are present throughout the political party system (with the exception of the AfD), as well as in the media, and they are starting to make their influence felt electorally. In 2013, they made up nearly 10 percent of eligible voters. By the same token, the group of Germans that in the 1980s considered themselves simply “Germans” are now forced to understand themselves as one group of Germans: white Germans are now Biodeutsche (in the parlance of the right wing), Almans, or simply “potatoes” (a mocking term preferred by German youths of “migratory background”).

They are these things precisely because there are other Germans who call them these things and have the means to be heard calling them that. The self-evident sense that certain Germans retained of who is a voter and what a fellow citizen looks like has disappeared. An imagined space of impunity, of assumed homogeneity, is in the process of vanishing. There is a small town in Bavaria that dresses up in yellowface once a year for a “Chinese carnival”—in 2018 they had to do it with one visibly perplexed Asian-German reporter in their midst, who was covering their rituals for VICE Germany.

Now, when a politician or a public intellectual or a newspaper goes on a Rumspringa in the rightmost reaches of the political spectrum, or if the fine citizens of some small town decide to set fire to a house, there is less of a script by which they would be welcomed back into respectability. Certain ethnic Germans used to take it as their seigneurial right to shower cruelty on the vulnerable and return to the mainstream after a cooling-off period to be listened to and shaken hands with. They are beginning to feel deprived of that right.

For decades, purveyors of the rhetoric of technocratic stability have outsourced their and their voters’ most sadistic and unpalatable beliefs and impulses to the far right. But Schäuble’s career suggests that, while technocratic governance has countless mechanisms to repress its own inherent cruelty and outsource them to the fringes, there is a kind of cruelty that comes from, and is enjoyed at, the center rather than the fringes. To many of its subjects—refugees being told that persecution without torture isn’t enough to win them asylum, unemployed workers being forced to provide all their rejection letters to prove they’re actively looking for work, Greek politicians being told to cut loose the country’s pensioners in the order to reassure investors—this inherent cruelty is wholly self-evident.

Schäuble himself understood early on that technocracy has its sadistic side, and he has embraced it. Both major German parties have in the last thirty years occasionally lapsed into a politics of administered cruelty. The Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency) that privatized the state-owned companies in East Germany, the safety-net cuts of “Agenda 2010,” and the draconian austerity measures after the financial crisis of 2008—all of these were approached by serious old men in smart suits in boardrooms with a kind of resigned shrug. We don’t like it either, they seemed to say, but this is what needs to happen. Schäuble, however, didn’t shrug at all—he seemed to feel genuine glee at the dictates that everyone else pretended to accept only reluctantly. Politicians of his type have been adept at making sound quantitative and objective what ultimately boils down to a demand for suffering, for mortification.

The success of the AfD suggests that Schäuble shares the recognition that alternativelessness has its religious, sacrificial dimension with a growing segment of voters in Germany. These voters have long recognized the carefully sublimated cruelty of alternativelessness; in many cases they’ve been at the receiving end of it. They accepted some of that cruelty for themselves, although very little—nothing more than a light paddle and an available safe word. But above all they demanded that, whatever cruelty the system meted out to them or people like them, it visit ten times that onto the Other. The AfD began as a party of technocrats, and its founders frequently seem surprised by how it sleepwalked from deficits and Euroskepticism to overt racism and illiberalism. One of the movement’s forerunners was Thilo Sarrazin, once an economist at Germany’s central bank, who at some point went from prognosticating that runaway deficits would spell Germany’s doom to prognosticating that runaway procreation by “hijab-girls” would spell Germany’s doom.

It’s a trajectory that isn’t actually all that surprising. Thanks to politicians like Schäuble, for decades now these voters have become used to being applauded for this perspective. Their coldness was reconceptualized as maturity, realism, steeliness of resolve. As the refugees arrived in 2015, CSU’s Secretary General worried that society would “implode” and “the people” would rise up. “Anyone who doesn’t recognize this,” he added about his bit of apocalyptic fan fiction, “ignores reality.” Pragmatic positions were recast as “political correctness,” as “failed multiculturalism,” while bizarre fantasies about racial civil war could stake a claim to being the “realistic” or “serious” position. This is how documents like the German Basic Law, with its talk about “the dignity of man,” or international asylum conventions, could seem to them like softhearted hippie tracts. The only realistic way of looking at the world was looking to make it hurt.

Adorno once spoke of the “categorical imperative of ‘never again’,” and the anxiety with which people watch unemployment figures in Germany is all about this “again”—about fascism as relapse, as repetition. It is against this background that the 12.6 percent of the vote the AfD won nationally in last year’s elections constitutes an incredible shock. Against the easy sociology and the old stories, what the result actually highlights is that Germany now specializes in a fascism in the midst of satiety. Perhaps even a fascism of satiety. And that this, rather than some vague revival of Nazism, is the shape that far-right populism has long taken in the country. As the historian Birte Förster put it on Twitter: “It’s not like Weimar, it’s not like 1933, it’s like Germany, 2018.”

After World War II, German nationalism became an impossibility. It survived largely by being refracted through economics, above all exports. Affluence at home gave people the feeling that “we are somebody again,” as the saying went. The wave of German cars, wares and weapons washing over Europe and the world took the place of German troops. Germans have long moralized economics (not for nothing did Max Weber write The Protestant Ethic in Heidelberg), but after World War II economics to some extent replaced politics: it reconciled Germany with its neighbors and former victims, it finally integrated Germany in an interconnected Europe, and eventually it dismantled the Iron Curtain and unified the country.

But in hindsight it is hard to miss the fact that this economic system, for all its technocratic mousiness, was suffused with displaced affective energy. And not just pride in one’s own wealth, but also a sadistic glee over the misery of others, which is interpreted in similarly moral or theological terms as Germany’s postwar economic success. This was true both between Germany and its neighbors and within Germany itself. Nachtwey probably underplays the ethnic dimension of what he calls “social modernity.” Unlike the New Deal in the United States, postwar affluence in Germany was not explicitly premised on racial stratification. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to sense a connection between the kind of solidarity that underpinned the postwar system of “social market capitalism” and the fact that the massive amounts of wealth created never went to the new arrivals in the country—the Turks, Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs who were at any rate still referred to as “guest workers,” even after decades in the country, sometimes even after obtaining German citizenship.

The righteous fury with which Germans have voiced their suspicion that most immigrants aren’t “really” refugees, but are, horror horrorum, motivated by hopes for a better life, is of a piece with this moralization. Germans have become good at denying others what they take to be their own birthright: they are terrified of foreigners taking their jobs, and then inundate Austrian medical schools and Swiss hospitals. They demanded that Greece put its pension system on a sustainable footing, but managed no such thing themselves during decades of affluence. In an infamous 2009 interview that prefigured the rhetoric of the AfD, Sarrazin claimed that “70 percent of Turkish and 90 percent of the Arab population of Berlin . . . live off the state but reject that state.” The irony is that, from retirees via the underemployed rural voters to professionals getting rich off subventions and the dividends of the social safety net, this describes pretty much the average AfD voter.

In his memoir of the Greek debt crisis, Yanis Varoufakis describes the existential vise in which German policymakers held his country. He thinks they’re playing “politics,” but the story he tells is rather of policymakers playing theology. Schäuble, Varoufakis’s bête noire, is a Protestant from the most Calvinist part of Germany. His view of debt and obligation is religious. To him, the Greeks had sinned and now had to do penance. And penance for him, Varoufakis suggests, would mean expelling the Greeks from the EU, forcing them into indigence.

Angela Merkel, child of unification, queen of the center, meanwhile had decided that Greece would remain in the EU. Varoufakis points out that either course of action would have been preferable to a combination of both. He is understandably more interested in the existential dilemma into which German conservatives’ moralization of economics has plunged his country than their reasons for doing so. But those reasons are fascinating: The tag team of Merkel and Schäuble treated countries as autonomous (good or bad) actors, when in fact German wealth had always been premised on greater and greater interconnections.

Neoliberalism has inured people to viewing the world in fundamentally sadomasochistic terms: realistic is that point of view that looks to inflict suffering. And politician-administrators like Wolfgang Schäuble have given them a sense of how to take pleasure in it. While the AfD still commands a minor share of the electorate, this poisonous optic has taken hold of large portions of the German public. Splenetic about any reminders of a global interconnectedness of which they are the massive beneficiaries, these voters applaud themselves for a toughness they largely visit upon people they never have to meet.

It is true that the gig economy, widespread precariousness, and self-employment have made the economic lives of especially younger Germans extremely insecure compared to their elders. And yet it is not them but their elders who channel an economic anxiety that isn’t theirs into votes for the AfD. Maybe Adorno had it half-right. The fear among some ethnic Germans is that the vicissitudes of the world market could do to them what they habitually do to people who do not look like them.

There Is No Alternativelessness :  What's been hiding Germany's hidden crisis? By Adrian Daub.

nplusonemag  , April 16, 2019

Talk of succession is in the air. After 18 years, Angela Merkel is stepping down as chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s main ruling party since 2005. The party’s conference meets this week in Hamburg to decide her replacement. But whoever follows Ms. Merkel — for many, Europe’s de facto leader — will inherit a fractious party and, if Ms. Merkel is unwilling or unable to see out her chancellorship through to 2021, a fragmented country.

The stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end. Her looming retirement marks a deepening crisis of the German political system that threatens not just the future of the country, but of the European Union.

Explanations for this shake-up often begin and end with Ms. Merkel. Her handling of the so-called refugee crisis and her downbeat, aloof style alienated large chunks of the electorate. The gradual weakening of the centrist parties has in turn fed polarization and the fragmentation of the electorate.

But Ms. Merkel, for all her power and influence, is just one politician. Germany’s new political crisis runs much deeper. It stems from an economic system that has resulted in stagnant wages and insecure jobs. The erosion of Germany’s postwar settlement — a strong welfare state, full-time employment, the opportunity to move up in the world — has created a populace open to messages and movements previously banished to the fringes.

As with its politics, on the surface Germany appears to be an economic success story. Its G.D.P. has grown consistently for nearly a decade; unemployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1989. In amassing trade surpluses, Germany has enjoyed several advantages: an advanced manufacturing sector; the ability to get primary products and services from other members of the European Union; and being in the eurozone, which effectively gives the country a devalued currency, making its exports more attractive.

But the system has come at a cost. To maintain their competitive advantage in the global market, companies held down wages. Though for skilled workers in the export-oriented manufacturing sector pay remained stable, or even rose, less-skilled and low-wage workers suffered. This was made possible by decentralizing collective bargaining in the 1990s, which greatly weakened the power of unions.

The other, more alarming reason underlying the country’s political crisis — connected to, but distinct from, the economy — is the erosion of the German social model in recent decades. Though never as socially inclusive as the Scandinavian countries, postwar Germany had a comprehensive welfare state and robust labor unions, ensuring that citizens from the lower strata could achieve a decent living standard and a bit of wealth through full-time employment.

In West Germany, where a secure job was the norm, full-time employment served as the foundation of social integration. The classic metaphor to describe this arrangement was coined by the sociologist Ulrich Beck in the 1980s: the “elevator effect.” It implied that though social inequality still existed, everyone was rising in the same social “elevator,” meaning that the gap between rich and poor wouldn’t widen.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

The number of precarious jobs like temp positions has exploded. At the height of postwar prosperity, almost 90 percent of jobs offered permanent employment with protections. By 2014, the figure had fallen to 68.3 percent. In other words, nearly one-third of all workers have insecure or short-term jobs. Moreover, a low-wage sector emerged employing millions of workers who can barely afford basic necessities and often need two jobs to get by.

The German middle class is shrinking and no longer functions as a cohesive bloc. Though the upper-middle class still enjoys a high level of security, the lower middle contends with a very real risk of downward mobility. The relatively new phenomenon of a contracting — and internally divided — middle class has set off widespread anxiety.

Instead of a single elevator, Germany today now resembles a bank of escalators in a department store: one escalator has already taken some well-to-do customers to the upper floor, while for those below them, the direction of travel begins to reverse. The daily experience of many is characterized by constant running up a downward escalator. Even when people work hard and stick to the rules, they often make little progress. 

These fears of social decline also accelerate xenophobia. There can be no doubt that a majority of Germans welcomed the new immigrants, just over two million in number, who arrived in 2015. But significant sections of the lower middle and the working class disapproved. When ascent no longer seems possible and collective social protest is almost nonexistent or ineffective, people tend to grow resentful. This has led to accumulated dissatisfaction with the old major parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

West Germany’s three-party system of the postwar era is now a six-party system, making the formation of stable coalitions much more difficult, a condition exacerbated by the declining vote shares for the major parties. (It took almost six months to form the current government, which faces periodic threats of collapse.) The right-populist Alternative for Germany, whose leading figures flirt with racist language and tolerate fascists among their ranks, has entered every state parliament. Formed in 2013, it is now one of the loudest voices in national politics, effectively the opposition.

The Greens too appear to be profiting from disenchantment with the main parties, attracting voters who prefer centrist politics but no longer trust the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats to stand up to the far right, or to improve living standards. Traditional loyalties no longer hold. A nervous, agitated mood has settled across political life.

As Ms. Merkel’s political career nears its end, and her possible replacements vie in Hamburg, it seems clear that the economic and social regime over which she presided is breaking down. Rising inequality has contributed to fragmentation in German society, fueling right-wing populism and fundamentally reordering the country’s politics. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

It Doesn’t Matter Who Replaces Merkel. Germany Is Broken. Oliver Nachtwey. The New YorkTimes , December  7  , 2018. 

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